Gretchen Felker-Martin’s masterful genre-bending horror novel, Manhunt (Macmillan Feb 22), has already gathered an incredible amount of steam online for its premise. Reading fiction gives us feelings that shape us but not always in ways we can articulate. What we learn from fiction is a less tangible affair. Novels aren’t only for learning political do’s and don’ts. Fiction, despite popular self-help books, is not a genre built upon self-improvement. Too often trans women are scapegoated, their work denied an audience, not allowed to play, not allowed to bite without being considered dangerous. Few believed she was a trans woman and for that she paid dearly. I don’t know if trans women writers will ever forget the virtual thrashing science fiction writer Isabel Fall received for not revealing her biography alongside her short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter.” Isabel Fall was bullied off the internet due to unverified claims about her identity. Many trans women have been held to the fire with this morality test. Authors and characters are conflated, their politics becoming one and the same as biographies are increasingly read as manuals on how to read an author’s work. Between autofiction, political purity, and murky narrators, we’ve been trained to fact check characters’ moral failings as our own. You can signal your stance on any number of topics with a well-placed novel. Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin Macmillan
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